Las Vegas takes what in other American towns is but a quixotic inflammation of the senses for some poor salary mule in the brief interval between the flagstone rambler and the automatic elevator downtown and magnifies it, foliates it, embellishes it into an institution.

A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stujf and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

The awful thing about most people is their caution—the crawling, abject bird-in-a-hand theory.

For I believe in harbors at the end.

Nothing lasts except beauty—and I shall create that.

As hand-to-hand combat has gradually disappeared from our civilization, even in wartime, and competition has become more and more sophisticated and abstract, Americans have turned to the automobile to satisfy their love of direct aggression.

This is the artist, then—life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave.

He did not believe in angels with soft faces and bright wings, but he believed in the dark spirits that hovered over the heads of lonely men.

Most of the time we think we’re sick, it’s all in the mind.

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.